The Beauty Farm

We were sitting upstairs one evening, Mihai, Linda and I, trying to plan our trip through Italy.
Linda was consulting her memory of past excursions as well as friends' recommendations, Mihai was online looking for hotels and I was searching through Sandor Clegane fanart images, browsing through La Tartine Gourmande diligently studying Italian road maps.
At that point our agenda wasn't very concrete, all we knew was that we were sure we wanted to spend a couple of days in and around Tuscany.  That meant we were wide open for suggestions on places to stay so when Mihai peered at the monitor and read "San Lorenzo A. Linari Beauty Farm and Health Spa" we felt no need to take such a preposterously-named option seriously.
Except it turns out it was one of the few places that wasn't $500 a night or in the middle of a city with no parking available or a place where we would be sharing a bathroom with 7 other guests (I'm pretty adventurous but at the end of the day I want to have my own toilet. Don't judge).
Our light-hearted jocularity turned into head-scratching serious contemplation: a beauty farm and health spa?  Try as I might I could come up with no realistic image of what such a place might look like.  Somewhere floating around in my brain was a sort of Italian version of a mega-plex we had stayed in outside of Cheyenne, Wyoming.  Ugh.  But if it was cheap and we could park there, who cared?  We weren't going to Tuscany to look at the interiors of hotels, right?
A night in San Lorenzo A. Linari was booked and then promptly forgotten until our last morning in Bologna when the question arose: where are we going tomorrow?
I consulted my notebook (on rare occassions I can be organized) and read: "San Lorenzo A. Linari Beauty Farm and Health Spa".
Huh?
Oh yeah, (laughter all round) that beauty farm place!
When Mihai typed the address into the GPS, it would not recognize it as a viable, exact location, only the general area was found.  We asked the concierge at the hotel in Bologna but he was mystified as well.
Ah, no matter, we shrugged with the confidence that comes from standing in a well-known place in the daylight. We'll figure it out. Who cared about some mega-plex that was probably located right off the highway next to a McDonalds and a Billa?
I've forgotten exactly what we did that day, I'm sure Linda recalls, but the fact that is most germane is that by the time we headed off to The Beauty Farm, dusk was setting in.  By the time we took the road to San Lorenzo, it was dark.
A mega plex off the side of the highway?  Er, no.
Try a farm house in the middle of no where off a narrow, twisting cobblestone road and then a dirt road and then a dirt path off that.  No strip mall, no McDonalds, no lights.
Now I'm not saying I wanted to see a McDonalds or a strip mall because I did not but some kind of street sign or human inhabitant would have been comforting at that point.
You can imagine the conversation in the car as we drove around in the dark:
"I don't think this is the right road."
"What did that sign say back there?"
"Do we even have the address right?"
"Why didn't we get more details before we left Bologna?"
"This can't be the right road."
"What kind of place calls itself a beauty farm?" (the last was an irrelevant bit spoken out of frustration, I confess).
It turns out it was the right road.  But first we had to drive up and down it several times stopping about 50 meters (I swear I'm not kidding) from where the building was and turning around before we convinced ourselves we must be in the right place.
This is what the road looked like.  Only in the dark. Imagine.

We walked up the little hill, met the bespeckled proprietor and were shown to our rooms as if the preceeding dirt-road-in-the-dark-driving-confusion had never occurred.

Do the photos do it justice?  I don't know.  Would we have been so impressed if we hadn't been expecting a strip mall next door and floral-print polyester bedspreads in the rooms?  I don't know.
One thing for sure is that we regretted not knowing more about the accommodations because if we had we would have bought some wine, a good loaf of bread and some cheese to eat on the awesome wood table in the awesome room pictured above.  And there we would have celebrated our. wedding. anniversary.  Seriously.  It was almost completely forgotten.
In acknowledgment of the date we ate pistachios and finished off a bottle of mineral water we'd bought in Siena and together with Linda and the boys, talked about our favorite memories from that day fifteen years ago (how time flies).  Kind of a mini-party without good food or music. So kind of not a party at all. But other than wishing for some cake to go with the pistachios, I had no complaints.  Life was sweet that night at the beauty farm.
Or in any case it was better than the alternative which would have involved being lost and sleeping in the car.

The next morning after breakfast by a crackling fire we examined our accommodations in the daylight. Even with the fog and the dampness we remained impressed and wished we had more time to spend.  Alas, we'd been prepared for instant coffee and the sounds of the freeway nearby so we imagined we would be happy to rush off with nary a backward glance.  I'm sad to say that it was impossible to linger longer than 10:00 am that morning.
Take home lesson: never judge a hotel by its ridiculous name.

I can only imagine this place in the height of the Tuscan summer when the pool is open and the table tennis tournament is going full swing and all of the dining areas are filled with guests eating the aforementioned cheese, crusty bread, and sipping wine.

Oddly enough, this image made me wistful not for a chance to extend our year-long adventure so we can visit Tuscany next summer, but to return home.  Home as in California.  Where we will spent the height of the Santa Cruz summer (which is to say September) drinking wine and eating crusty, cheese drenched pizza and watch Stefan and Razvan running around on the lawn with Mircea and Lucian and my parents will have their grandsons with them once more. And all of the other members of our large and much-loved clan of friends and family will be only a phone call away: hey guys, the coals are hot, the dough is ready, come on over.
They say the best vacations are those that make you happy to go home again. For the first time since we left Santa Cruz I felt that way.  I suppose that was the real beauty from San Lorenzo A. Linari.

By the way, Linda has the down-low on the incredibly interesting history of this place.  I'm sure she will share it on her blog so use the link and look for it in the coming weeks. (no pressure, Linda, take your time <wink>)

Messina

Messina was the first stop on the cruise (remember I warned you that I wasn't going to go in order).
Until that point our traveling SOP consisted of looking up 3 restaurants, jotting down their address and then hitting the streets and trying to find them.
Sounds lame but it worked.
But then we did the cruise which meant we started from a ship.  And then we became tempted by these things called land excursions.  And then we listened to fellow-cruisers talk about their experiences and we began to doubt ourselves and our abilities to be tourists without guides and buses and people speaking English.
In short, we were thrown off our game.
Or maybe it's just that Messina is not all that interesting.
I shouldn't say that.  Probably it was us.  Yes, I'm sure it was us.
Unlike other ports we visited, the city is directly across the street from where the boat is docked.  As in, you walk across the gangplank and are unceremoniously dumped into Messina.  Auto, bus and train traffic, vendors hawking their wares and even a nice little cafe within a stone's throw of your cabin window.  Sounds simple, right?
The easier it was, the more confused we became.  I have no explanation for this.  At least none that is in any way flattering for Mihai or I.
We exited the ship in the middle of heaving mass of people which promptly made me so nervous and agitated that I said "whichever way the throng is moving, we must go the other direction."  (Fear of closed spaces, fear of crowds, fear of snails, I have a nice little list of phobias to my credit).
In any case, after 20 meters we stopped for a coffee break.  Must be some kind of record for us.  But at least we got a photo of Mircea looking sophisticatedly world-weary with his cappuccino.

From the barista Mihai obtained the names and whereabouts of 2 local restaurants.  So we should have been set, right?  Right.  But no.  No, somehow it all went wrong and we walked around for hours not only unable to eat anywhere (one of the restaurants was closed and the other we could just never manage to find) but also not seeing anything really that interesting. We were trying to see something of note, we were trying to be impressed.  Really. It was our first port, of course we were trying to have that moment when we were stopped in our tracks, looked at each other and said with big smiles "Wow!"
But what we saw was a lot of this:

Yeah.

I know that one of the reasons I write this blog is to provide a moment of escapism for my friends and family back home but I also am a big proponent of keeping it real.  If I tried to tell you it's all-glamour-all-the-time I would not only be embarrassingly pretentious but lying as well.
In any case, you would not be fooled because I already confessed about the head lice a few months ago.

Here's the fact: the best views we got of Messina were from the boat.

But I'm still standing by my statement that it's not Messina, it was us.  We were just...off somehow.  We should have followed the crowds.  Surely they were onto something, right?
However, all was not lost: we at last found a restaurant where there were no menus in English and none of the staff spoke English and so we ordered blind.  That in itself was cool (even if I got 10 times the amount of protein I would normally eat in a week.)
I had what I believe is the best wine I've ever tasted and it was 3, yes three Euro a glass. Numbers don't need translation.  3.
And then later we found a cafe and had a splendid espresso and cappuccino which cost (drum roll) 0.80 and 1.20 Euro respectively.
Huh?
Why can't we do this in the States?
So bravo for your excellent quality and outstanding pricing on wine and espressos, Messina.  Bravo.
Oh, and your awesome views from afar.

Crete

Sometimes you go to a place which isn't so picturesque but you have terrific food or an interesting experience so it still warrants a post on your blog.
Sometimes you go to a place and you do nothing more than walk around slack-jawed at the beauty that surrounds you.
It's okay to have beauty but no stories providing you consistently remember to keep your camera focused.
If you don't, you have a post with four sentences and 11 usable photos.

Greece

Apparently one can become saturated with visiting ancient ruins, a fact I had suspected but never before had the chance to prove.  After our trip to Athens I now know it to be true.
Is the end result that you are underwhelmed or overwhelmed?  I'm still trying to figure that out.
Here's the deal: all of the structures are old and huge and more or less share the same color tone and one stands before them (or under them) and takes photo after photo and says things like "wow, this is incredible" until it begins to lose it's meaning.  Or maybe I just lack the appropriate level of appreciation for the ancient Hellenistic world. I confess I often have to pause and think carefully to be sure I don't mix up my Roman and Greek mythology (Jupiter always felt so Greek to me and Pluto so Roman) but it's not as if I think history is irrelevant.  On the contrary, there are few things more vital to understanding the world as we know it.  If I could have been assured of securing some sort of paying job in the field, I would have been a history major and studied feudal Japan instead of how to insert a urinary catheter.
But touring Athens made me feel like one of those teenagers who skulks about on field trips and secretly sends texts to her friends that say "this is so lame."
But what is lame?  Lame is standing on the flipping Acropolis and thinking nothing more than "Hmm...it's kind of cold on this hill and that lady bringing her walker up here was a bad idea, she's going to fall."
Someone should have slapped me.
Fortunately Mihai was not behaving like a pathetic teenager, he was suitably excited and got photographs for your enjoyment.

So we went there, saw that and descended the slippery, wind-blasted marble steps.  At this point the nurse in me feels the need to say few words about these precarious, borderline-suicidal stairs:  we are four relatively healthy, young, in-shape (maybe in-shape is stretching the truth a bit) people and the day was sunny and dry and even under those conditions we experienced a bit of trouble making our way down.  I can't imagine what they are like in the rain when a person is either aged or otherwise compromised below the waist (as in feet, knees and ankles). What a nightmare.
One is far better off visiting the Temple of Zeus and Hadrian's Arch which are on flat surfaces.  They appear to have the additional advantage of not appearing as hot spots in any tourist books.  I say that because when we arrived we happily discovered we were four of 12 people there.
But I know, I know, it's just Hadrian's Arch which means it doesn't have that glamorous ring when people ask you how you came to be in a body cast and you get the chance to say "Oh, I was visiting the Acropolis and there are these marble stairs...."

Next stop, the changing of the palace guards and all I have to say about this experience is that I am adding it to my list of "Least Wanted Jobs".  Currently it's above Macy's Day Parade Float Rider though below both Speleologist and Professional Mucous Specimen Collector.
I mean no disrespect at all to these men in uniform and its really not the thought of wearing those shoes, those tights or even those skirts (er...long jackets?) that I find so personally horrifying.  Its the thought of being photographed while doing so.  Photographed by throngs of disrespectfully laughing tourists standing about 2 feet away.  No thank you.  That job plus their debt crisis?  More than anyone should have to endure with such a straight face.
Yet they do.
Bravo, panty-hose wearing Greek men, I salute you (except you can't salute them, it's against the rules and they have a machine-gun wearing camo-outfitted solider on hand just to make sure you don't.  But somehow laughing is okay-go figure).

Did I mention we got a taxi for the day?  I did not.  Well, we got one.
The original plan had been to catch the train into Athens since we'd heard it was easy to do but on the walk from the ship to the train station we were stalked by Niko, The Marvelous Greek Taxi Driving Wizard who wove such a web of persuasion that in the end we could do nothing but compliantly crawl into his yellow-painted Skoda.
(In fact what he said was: "You'll pay 21E each for the train and buses and I'll drive you myself for 22E each which will save you time and confusion."  Magic I tell you, magic.)
Not only did Niko save us time and confusion but he somehow managed to get us everywhere just ahead of the crowds.  I don't know how he did it but he did.  By the way, the Temple of Zeus and Hadrian's Arch were Niko's idea. Magic.
Niko assumed we would want to go to the historic downtown district for some shopping but Turkey had saturated every shopping cell in my being and the only thing we really wanted from Greece was some Ouzo.  Did Niko know of a place where we could buy some good quality Ouzo for a good price?  Niko did.
"I take you where the Greeks shop," he said.  "No tourists."  Through a maze of streets he wove and then had to go with Mihai into the store he chose because no one in there spoke any English. They emerged with bottles of Ouzo in nondescript, modest-looking boxes, twice the amount and half the price of a bottle in the downtown district.  Where the Greeks shop indeed.
By then we were hungry but Niko anticipated our request: a local restaurant, nothing too touristy.  Exactly.
We were the only patrons in the place which is a good thing when what you want is elbow room but isn't necessarily a good sign when what you want is really good food. Nick strikes again.
A few minutes after we sat down the owner came out with a plate of fresh fish and told us to pick which one we wanted.  No menus, just pick a fish.
Once we settled on the grouper, he described how he would prepare it and then what sort of sides he thought might go well with it.
When you're in that situation the smart thing to do is just nod and agree.  End result: one grouper devoured, one bowl of tomatoes, feta cheese and sliced red onions devoured, one bowl of tzatziki devoured, one bowl of olives devoured, one plate of crusty bread and some kind of wonderful milky olive oil devoured.  Our plates were wiped clean.  Clean.
At the end of the meal the owner came out and tried to persuade us to let him prepare a bowl of fresh fruit, "for the children at least" he begged but we were in danger of having our lunch revisit us if we continued eating.  In fact, it was no longer lunch time, it was nearing four o'clock in the afternoon and dinner on the ship was a mere two hours away.  A nap was in order, that is to say, I could feel a mild coma coming on.  It was time to crawl back into Niko's yellow-painted Skoda and head back to our monolith of a ship.

I would like to have walked on a beach in Greece but the afternoon grew cool (it being November and all) and we figured our Greece Beach Vacation is for another time.

My one serious regret is that I did not get a photo of Niko but when we parted he told me happily: "I'm on Facebook!" 

If you have an account you can look him up under Niko, The Marvelous Greek Taxi Driving Wizard.